Intelligent Design updates: latest Nov 1, 2k5

Clickup the title of this blog entry, and afterward maybe you'll want to re-read the original blog entry of Friday, October 21, 2005 > Intelligent Design: Science: The Wrath of NoGod (naturalistic religion + money + technique) = bigotry of scientific guilds.

Further, it's important to correct the impression given that creationism is a minor phenomenon among the belief systems of American Christians, and Americans more generally. Not so! Creationism may be minor among that minority of American Christians and Americans generally who are certified scientists. However, that fact shrinks into relative insignificance alongside another fact: 81 percent of Americans reject evolutionism.

Many adults in the United States agree with the principles of creationism, according to a poll by CBS News. 51 per cent of respondents say God created human beings in their present form. ¶ Conversely, 30 per cent of respondents believe human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, but God guided this process, while 15 per cent think God had no part in the evolution of man.

That is to say, Creation by a Divine Creator, either in the belief-system of creationists (using a false hermeneutics of the Biblical account) or in the belief-system of those who ascribe to evolution, not as an Ism but as a guided process by the Divine Creator - together these constitute 81 percent of the American population. Only 15 percent believe in the unguided atheistic naturalistic neo-Darwinist religion of evolutionism. How many Americans are certified scientists in one discipline or another the guilds of which claim their disciplines as constitutional to evolutionism? How many of that number of scientists are not actually competent to judge the detailed exacting scientific work that goes into giving evolutionary theory (guided or naturalistic) any semblance of scientific credibility? - as against, you know, the huge proportion of scientists who actually make their judgment on the basis of authorities in their guilds and disciplines, or on those of some other sciences?

The fraction of the fraction of scientists competent to judge gets down to well below 1% of the American population. Yet, they are determining what teachers in schools may teach on the basis of textbooks the teachers cannot possibly validate. So, why should taxpayer-supported teachers in government schools who can't possibly know the science by allowed to determine the choice of the neo-Darwinist religious perspective as the basis on which to avoid prospecting in the potentials of the idea of Intelligent Design (so what if ID is not yet a settled theory, it is a credible viewpoint with nearly one hundred years of American philosophical-scientitifc history). And, if ID is not yet established as a theory as some claim, including some ID-minded scientists themselves, then why should not funds to evolutionist scholars, guilds, journals, and teachers associations be cut in half; and the remaining half of these funds re-directed to non-evolutionist scholars, guilds, journals, and groupings of science teachers in schools - so as to create a genuinely "level playing-field" in which a genuine debate may unfold thru-out society, a debate not predetermned by the contrived monopoly of funding that generates a dogmatic scientific orthodoxy without real critical thawt and courageous dissent. Yes, I endorse the prosthesis view on free speech regarding evolutionism and ID in the schools, but within the contours outlined here.

As to the percentages in the Angus Reid poll, another 5 percent goes unlabelled, so let's treat that as filling out the statistical margin of error, extrinsic to percentages of the opinion divide between a Divine Creator and evolutionism raised as a substitute no-god and arrogating to itself alone the value of scientificity.

Besides the update and correction above, I should also call attention to the one-sided presentation of just one line of development in the Christian critical reflection on evolutionism. Here I can only mention a very important interview in a Roman Catholic news source, Zenit with Jesuit Father Edward Oakes, a theology professor at the University of St. Mary of the Lake. The interview comes from Zenit in two parts. Evolution in the Eyes of the Church (Part 1 - The Importance of Definitions, July 27, 2005; and Part 2 - Reconciling Science and Faith, July 28, 2005. The background to the Zenit interviews of Oakes have to do with an earlier widely-read article:

It isn't often that cardinals from another continent get space in the op-ed pages of The New York Times.

Such was the case on July 7 when Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna and principal editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, tried on the opinion page of the NYT to clarify the Church's teachings in regard to the theories of Charles Darwin. His statements ignited a firestorm of commentary.

Schönborn's article, "Finding Design in Nature," NYT, July 7, 2005, and a NYT frontpage article two days later, "Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution", July 9, 2005, are part of a story of journalistic manipulation and distortion, says Oakes.

For one thing, the Church has no "doctrine" on evolution, any more than it has a doctrine on tectonic plates or a magisterial teaching on how human consciousness arises from the electrical firings inside the neurology of the brain. These matters are both beyond the competence of the magisterium and are irrelevant to salvation, anyway.

Secondly, even if the magisterium did have an official teaching on evolution, it does not officially revise its "views" on matters of science by having a cardinal, however "leading," writing an article "in propria persona" -- on his own behalf -- and using an op-ed piece in a secular newspaper to boot.

That said, I believe that Cardinal Schönborn's essay "Finding Design in Nature" in the July 7 issue of the Times makes a valid point, roughly the reverse side of the coin of what Pope John Paul II said in his now-famous letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October of 1996.

John Paul said at the time that "evolution" -- which, as Cardinal Schönborn rightly notes, the Holy Father left undefined -- can no longer be considered merely a "hypothesis" because so much data have now come in to confirm the theory.

The problem is that this very short letter brought some misinterpretations of its own in its wake -- because of the obnoxious way some Darwinians like to hijack the word "evolution" for their own atheistic purposes -- and it is those false conclusions, as I see it, that the cardinal was trying to warn against.

For the remainder of the two part interview, I leave it to intersted readers to explore a most interesting contribution. But before letting go, I pause to note that Oakes makes the same mistake I did earlier in my earlier blog entry on ID, the matter corrected at the beginning of this update.

if "creationism" means six-day creation as a few Christian fundamentalists still hold, then there is no chance in the world that the Catholic Church will join that cause. But "creationism" can also refer to the total ontological dependence of the universe on God's creative act of will, and nothing in the theory of evolution can threaten that essential doctrine of the Catholic faith.

The erroneoous statement here is simply that only "a few Christian fundamentalists still hold" to the creationist view of 1.) the sciences of life [biology], formation of the earth's crust [geology], and the latter's correlative science of water dynamics [hydrology]. And of 2.) the normative considerations in any science of interpretation of the Bible, particularly the first chapters of The Book of Genesis [Biblical hermeneutics, Genesis 1-3 hermenutics]. Unfortunately, for both Oakes and myself, the Angus Reid poll these Christian fundamentalists in America at least are not "a few," but the vast majority. And, their number must include a large number of Roman Catholics.

Another strategy must be found than one of dismissal of the creaitonist viewpoint, however mistaken it may be. Neo-Darwinism and all the school teachers dependent on its claims for a substitute-religion of evolutionism, has over-played its hand and brawt the long-time horizon itself into disrepute. It is distrusted by people who have nothing to do with fundamentalist churches, so-called "Creation Science," and other creationist groupings and institutions.

In addressing

Many Catholic scientists ... including Kenneth Miller, biology professor at Brown University and author of Finding Darwin's God [, Oakes notes that they] have requested a clarification from the Holy See on this issue [of how far we may be permitted to go with Darwin], claiming that from a strictly scientific standpoint, Darwin's description of biological origins is not incompatible with Catholic teaching. Do these scientists have a legitimate point?

Now, in Part 2 of the interview with Prof Dr Oakes, he disavows Intelligent Design and posits it in opposition to evolution, making no distinction such as James McCosh [a neo-Augustinian proponent of guided evolution] and Herman Dooyeweerd [a neo-Augustinian who revived what I call A's "time-staggered-releases capsule" view, a view resolutely based on a primary distinction between creatio ex nihilo vs realization in staggered moments across a long period of time. Instead, Oakes falls back on Thomistic recaps of Aristotle, and does so in a long boring passage that takes up too much space in this second part of the interview, which shrivels down into a real disappointment as a contribution to the evalution of ID by Roman Catholics. In the end, Oaks shoots his position in the foot and confounds all the creationist and ID Catholics who will in the end find Oaks out on a limb and a disppointment. Oakes never deals with the essential issue of biotic laws; to my mind, that means a reformed ID emerging as a fully developed theory in tandem with the path of research pioneered by Dr Uko Zylstra is far superiour to the Oakes / Miller orientation that the Catholic faithful in America so resoundingly reject. Still, creationism is not the answer, nor the problem; while Oakes' "Darwinist Catholicism" is part of the problem, not the solution. At the same time, Oaks without mentioning it, seems properly allergic to the neo-Darwinism of Richard Dawkins. So, to revert to eo-Darwinism, Oakes must move in a regressive direction to a position which no longer has any clout, just as Oakes reverts to Scholasticism with its elaborate system of embroideries on Aristotle. I do not mean to fawlt altogether the Aristotelian distinction between primary cause, and secondary causes, which not only recurs in Aquinas and the Westminster Confession of Faith, but which James McCosh used so fruitfully to stake out his neo-Augustinian approach that underlays his book of 1850, The Method of Divine Government which established Christian "theistic evolution" years before Darwin published The Origin of Species. McCosh was also an early proponent of Intelligent Design, which is not a latterday movement ex nihilo and de novo. - Owlb

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Natural History magazine

conducts 1st scholarly debate on ID vs EV0

evolution: science and belief

The authors who contributed to this Natural History report are:

Richard Milner and Vittorio Maestro, ed. (introduction)
Michael J. Behe, Ph.D. (ID) and Kenneth R. Miller, Ph.D. (EVO)
William A. Dembski, Ph.D. (ID) and Robert T. Pennock, Ph.D. (EVO)
Jonathan Wells, Ph.D. (ID) and Eugenie C. Scott, Ph.D. (EVO)
Barbara Forrest, Ph.D. (overview)

Further info: ActionBioscience.org has added "learn more links" to this report which consist of author-recommended links to online information to help readers learn more about each author's views. An "educator resources" section has also been created by ActionBioscience.org that includes additional links and an original class lesson for high school students through college undergraduates to accompany this report. Links can be accessed at the end of each author's comments or by scrolling to the bottom area of this web page.

USA: Civil Rites: Rosa Parks great pioneer of civil rites laid out with full honours in Capital building, Washington DC

Rosa Parks, the hero of American civil rites, was laid out in the American Capitol, where the public began filing thru to pay their respects an hour ago today, Sunday. Her remains will be on view thru Monday.



After laying in repose Saturday in the Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Montgomery, Alabama, a memorial service was held for her there on Sunday morning. After the public viewing in the US Capitol, another memorial event will take place for her on Monday, at Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church, Washington, DC. The funeral and a number of other events are planned for the city where she most recently made her domicile and attended church when able nowadays, Detroit, Michigan.

Rosa Parks was born in 1911, and died at the age of 94 years. She took her stand for equality in 1955, at 50 years of age, launching into its crest the Civil Rights Movement that achieved legislative backing in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Precious to the Lord is the life, witness, and death of Mother Rosa. - Owlb

I urge you to read LaShawn Barber's tribute here.

Pumpkins: Everywhere: Why the Blair Witch story pales into insignificance

a deliteful Halloween to you
perhaps a scary one too

Our word "Halloween" comes to us as a contraction of the expression "All Hallows Evening," to mark the time prior to the day on the Church Calendar marked "All Hallows Day." The word "hallows" itself is an Old English term for "holy ones" or "saints" which latter derives from the Latin root-word for "holy" - "sanctus."

Protestants will note that Martin Luther published his 95 Theses on the church door at Wittenburg, where they were read first on October 31, the day and evening before All Saints Day. So, for Protestants, October 31 is also Reformation Day, as well as for many of us, the evening before All Saints Day - Halloween, the scariest nite of the year. It's a an interesting juxtaposition. However, among Protestants who delite in Halloween and at the same time wish to celebrate Reformation Day, I've never witnessed a Reformational Day church meeting (which usually takes place at nite) where the youth were decked out in costumes, either modest or bizarre. Now that would be a delite! Instead, we get a Reformation Day's nite offered as a complete alternative to the society's general observance of Halloween.

Martin Luther would have a great belly-laff at such a spectacular celebration of his theses, which were set out to launch a debate among scholars, but which were immediately translated from the scholarly language of his time, Latin, into the vernacular first of the Wittenberg German-speakers, but then of the everyday languages thru-out late Medieval European Christendom.

Why do I think Luther would enjoy the great costume party and its overflow into our church-hall Reformation Day assemblages. Why?

Well, you know, there's a Bible verse at work here. Luther knew his Bible, and would immediately recognize the text I have in mind, altho you can't find it among the partisan histories of Halloween that want to appropriate our festival into an entirely early-Medieval pagan framework - for the purpose of taking possession of anything Christian, and thus advancing the cause of Christianophobia.

Nevertheless, the Bible in one of the Gospels tells us:

"The graves were opened; and many of the bodies of holy folk which had slept now arose." (Matthew 27:52)

These were the resuscitated bodies of many of the folks who had died, perhaps well before the time of Jesus. Their graves were opened, presumably by angels of God - during the dread time of three hours of darkness after Jesus had died and, according to the Apostles' Creed, "descended into Hell," and then three days later arose from the dead Himself. Meanwhile, after the graves were opened and the holy folk had arisen bodily from the sleep of death in cave-tombs where many had been embalmed, they remained in the vicinity for a while, until later, until after Jesus was buried, himself entombed, "descended into Hell, and the third day arose again from among the Dead." It was then that the holy folk who had arisen and awaited the Resurrection of Jesus, then themselves moved from the areas of the graves, tombs, cemetaries and went into Jerusalem, showing themselves to lots of people. And undoubtedly in rite good humour fritening those who saw them very much out of their wits! This is a Bible story of scary-kind humour slipped into the unrelenting cosmic-tragic narrative of the Crucifixion and Death story. The writer of this humourous vignette overlaps it into the post-resurrection narrative.

They came out of the graves after His resurrection, And went into the holy City, and appeared unto many." (Matthew 27:52,53)

Christians - whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox - did not simply appropriate for themselves a pagan costume-festival, rather they brawt with them an already-ancient story of their own, one that was intimate for many centuries already with the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, living and dead. We can add to the link with the Communion of Saints idea, a second one that bursts forth again in Luther's revived teaching of the Priesthood of All Believers, including the holy folk by faith who populated the Old Testament stories and the gravesites and cave-tombs thru-out Palestine.

So, have a deliteful Halloween this year, my dears, and a blessed Reformation Day, a blessed All Saints Day too. On the October 31, along with Halloween, remember the specifically-Protestant heritage (in costume, where permitted); and then observe All Saints Day which comes on the very next day on November 1, remember the Catholic Christian roots of all European Christendom, even the most Protestant and Reformational. It's a great time for reformational-ecumenical celebration, and getting scared out of your wits in a contained humourous festivity, while the actual world teems with horrors and news stories aplenty to thwart sleep in any case. - Anaximaximum

Evangelical Differences on Halloween

Politics: Canada: Christianophobia - Alive and mean in Canada

There is no clear movement for the inner reformation of judiciary-practice in Canada, nor for the inner reformation of the science-side of a multi-aspectual jurisprudence, such as we mite find in the philosophy of law of hi Canadian awareness. With the foregoing remark in place, I note it is just a background observation for today's blog entry on "Christianophobia - Alive and Mean in Canada."

I do not write as an adherent of "conservatism" in general, nor as an exponent of choosing between or combining of the "fiscon" position versus the "socon" position, as numerous analystists and practioners of conservatism in North America generally do. Fiscal responsiblity, the value of a mainly free market domestically and in regard to trade abroad, the value of policing an honest mainly-free market economic system - all this is a set of principles that can be held quite differently from a purist laissez-faire economic doctrine or Libertarian economic ideology based on a purist individualism. Likewise, social and societal responsiblity (the "soc" words can be fruitfully distinguished, while noting the intersection of the subjects these words adjectivize), soc-responsiblity can be adhered to firmly without absolutizing the (Roman Catholic Magisterium's) "Consistent Ethic of Life" as a general principle; nor absolutizing its subthemes either as a policy set or as a personal free selection from within the Roman Catholic set.

Consistent Ethic for Life thawt absolutizes a whole range of Magisterium-driven positions. Such as: absolute opposition to all abortion, absolute opposition to all non-heterosexual unons (what I oppose is genericization of marriage so that it is legally indistinguishable from "same-sex" arrangements and others), absolute opposition to all termination of life (I have no family at hand and want to be able to determine the time of my death when I am no longer functional otherwise or am at the mercy of unscrupulous care-givers), discrimination against all but "natural families" (what I oppose is the devaluing of family as a distinct societal sphere with its own set of characterizing relations (parent/s/children//siblings, and typified by gender differentiations thru-out). I support state benevolence, subject to fiscal planning, toward children in poverty and toward all kinds of families (parent/s and child/ren), while I reject a sometimes-occurring socon lack of compassion for all "sorts and condition" of women and men, according to which we see some self-styled "socons" shift over to mean fiscon positions to the exclusion of families outside the "natural family" model.

So much for the hazards of the binomial opposition in the usage of the terms "fiscon" and "socon" for contemporary "conservatism" in North America - both Canada and the USA. Were I to advocate around an alternative term, for now, I would choose the Bushes "compassionate conservatism." That would be a good rubric for me in facing a prevailing set of thawt patterns where my tendency of viewpoint seems to have little place to emerge in its own rite (I'm not the only person who holds to this tendency). I could stance myself elsewhere in the prevailing political miasma by spending my time trying to influence Canadian socialism a wee bit, in Europe such a strategy occurs in many countries with Christian Democratic and Christian Social parties (note, for instance, certain policy features of the winning party in the recent Polish elections); but only in the Netherlands does Christian political thawt rise to the level of articulating the importance of recognizing the validity of the differentiated societal spheres - from family policy (including various kinds of families - not just "natural families") to fiduciary policy (including various kinds of banks, trusts, foundations, coops - not just "for-profit free-market" varieties). Each exists in its own rite (sphere specificity) and calls into its functioning human personnel who retain individual and group factors in their identities which in turn have to be balanced justly within each particular case of organization or institution with a given societal sphere (sphere specificity).

A hallmark of human identity is religion. In each country, a society-wide pattern of variations, conflicts, and peaceful concords between religions can be established by careful analysis. We usually think of religions only in terms of theistic varieties (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, and polytheistic Hinduism, etc) or nowadays in terms of spiritualities (which cause us to pluralize the foregoing terms and to add non-theistic religions/spiritualities such as Buddhisms). But an even broader concept of religion requires the definition of a religion as a commitment to set of ultimate values; thereby we are allowed to identify Humanism, Secularism, and many other non-theistic or anti-theistic systems of valuation as religions (without a God the Creator perhaps, but always with a god-function in the form a hi-est value of ultimate belief-commitment for a person's or group's life - which atheist philosopher Anthony Flew has tawt us does not rule out atheist-naturalist versions of Intelligent Design opposed as much to neo-Darwinist evolutionism as is Creator-guided evolution or Creationism). Atheism too has its own internal varieties - Voltaire, Robespierre, Marx, Freud, Hitler, Stalnin, Mao, Rand, and many of today's Libertarians (these are the atheist/secularist versions of spiritualities). All these phenomena have a history of existence in various societies and all are subject to demographic analysis in regard to their adherents, groups, organizations, and institutions.

In recent years, it is possible to note a slide toward a deeper and deeper secularization process, pushed along by a definite ideology of Secularist religion. The drive to exclude the historic religion dominant once in a given society, to exclude its primal societal spheres of institutional grouping in churches and synagogues and mosques and temples, and to exclude the implications of the widespread presence in other spheres of fully-dimensioned persons as personnel, customers, lenders, borrowers, managers, union members, voters, office holders, bureaucrats, police, military, sports people, artists, filmgoers, TV viewers, radio listeners, radio-TV broadcasters, journalists in the various media, the drive to exclude a targeted kind of religion from having full course for persons of historic religious commitment functioning in these societal roles continues mercilessly and viciously apace. The main target in Canada is Christianity of certain kinds. And the drive to exclusion can legitimately be called "Christianophobia."

In recent times, one Member of Canada's Parliament has stood out for trying to name the pernicious force in Canadian civic life, the force that is attempting to drive certain kinds of outstanding Christians from civic life and to disadvantage them as such from full societal participation - because they stand out as publicly-stated persons committed to their faith, in the midst of all these societal roles that engage them. Since the kinds of Christianity are so diverse, and the spiritualities among those Christianities so varied, one need not deny to this Member of Parliament her hi standing and fortitude because one mite disagree with the Consistent Ethic of Life to which, apparently, she subscribes. In contrast to her stance in that regard, I personally distinguish my non-absolutist position on abortion, following Laura Bush - "abortion should be permitted, but rarely." That's but one example of the kind of policy issue with which I would disagree with my nominee for a Christian Bloggers' Ariel Award 2005.

Were it some other prioritized zone of policy such as the fiscons mite dwell on, I would for instance not recognize the actual welfare policy change the Harris Government imposed on Ontario as worthy of a Christian political stewardship of the economic life of society. Harris too we must recognize was part of the targetting of people, not because they belonged to kinds of Christianities, but because they were poor (and, it must be said some of those he targetted were only pretending to be poor, or only pretending to need welfare monies); it was the draconian actual policy-contours involved that produced the subchristian results that really did not thereby "perfect" a free economy in Ontario. So, my version of a Bush-following Christian politics of compassionate conservatism is very unhappy with certain features of the overall Bush policy results toward the American poor.

In Canada, on the other hand, I find certain Christian-political formations which take commendable stands in regard to antipoverty policy, especially supporting the allotment of funds for children in poverty, yet to be remiss in entirely disowning support for co-religionists who stand up against the targetting of certain kinds of fellow Christians/ities hurt greivously in their daily living by the rampant spread of Christianophobia. It is nowhere more cruel than in government-financed secularist schools, and in the news and opinion media in general.

A certain few seconds on a TV news report caused me to first become acutely aware of the phenomenon that awt to be powerfully opposed. It was the occasion of the Conservative Convention in Montreal - being reported on CTV, as I remember it - where a certain Member of Parliament had just given a speech about the systematic oppression of Christians in Canada.

Now, the MP spoke too narrowly about "Christians," not making clear apparently that it was some kinds of Christians and some kinds of Christianities that were being targetted by the secularist oppressor. Because - it was unstated - most Christians in Canada are very weak in regard to what the Lordship of Christ Jesus means for the Christian task in politics and in all realms of life; most Christians are neutralists as to the Christian ethical definition of the hi-est good we must pursue in civic co-existence - namely, "the coming of the Kingdom of God," as Herman Bavinck tawt us. But all the neutralism aside, all the fawlty "Christian" figures in politics like the stance toward Ontario's poor of the most recent Tory government there a-s-i-d-e, let's take note of the raw phenomenon of pro-secularist Christianophobia that refuses to dialogue with a compassionate Christian political force here in Canadadaland.

And more than that, let's take note of systematic bigotry, some more subtle than others, practised by news and opinion media in Canada. I will never forget the unprofessionalism and the unveiled bigotry of a female TV reporter, I think it was on CTV.ca, where almost the very first words out of the reporter's assassinatory mouth in regard to a Federal Conservative MP's speech to the convention was the stabbing of an anathematizing label onto her - fixing her to the wall with the (o)pin(ion-term) "extremist" - disembowelling her valuationally for her raising the issue of Christianophobia in our Canadian national life. The reporter was protecting Christianophobes as tho they themselves are not extremists, as tho they had a monopoly on moderation, clarity of thawt, mainstream positions, reasonablness, and whatever else is presupposed by a labeller deploying the word "extremist." Of course, there are extremists, and there are extremist Christianophobes, and some are in the media/

My nominee for the Christian Bloggers' Ariel Award 2005 is Cheryl Gallant, Member of Parliament for the farming and forestry riding of Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke, Ontario, along the Québec border. I honour her for outspoken challenge to the Christianophobes - without my necessarily endorsing a number of her policy positions to the letter (for reasons I hope I have already made clear).

Now, while I couldn't find the text online of Cheryl Gallant's speech Against the Christianophobes which she delivered at the Tory Convention, Montreal, reported Thursday, March 17, 2005 in a segment on CTV News with Lloyd Robertson, there is on CTV's website a more charitable dispatch by Canadian Press than what we got live in the segment. Accompanying CTV's clickable items regarding Gallant are some video clips, which my computer technology does not accomoadate, but which may well contain the video-soundbite where the CTV reporter performs her obscene "extremist" labelling.

However, I did actually find onlinje a list of Gallant's Speeches on some other issues, much of them related to her work on the House of Commons committees on National Defense and Veterans Affairs, and on Industry, Science, and Technology (the latter a perfect locus should there ever come a Parliamentary debate on Intelligent Design which many in the Christian, Judaic, and Islamic faith-communities should receive research grants in preference to some other matters funded as "science"). Other speeches listed have to do with constituency concerns, including the presentation of numerous petitions to Parliament.

I don't see extremism in the body of this work, tho I do see a firmly held minority view, a clear position I can't agree-with to the letter on several points, an occasional rivetting metaphor like the one comparing abortion to beheading (but of course that's exactly what partial-birth abortions are, where the infant just prior to birth is hacked apart in the womb, head removed from trunk, limbs removed one by one, etc, - because if allowed to be born, the child would suddenly by recognized in law as a human being and the abortionist recognized as a murderer (this practice is called "live-birth abortion") ... but I'm not sure the speech with this particular metaphor is on Gallant's website either).

I respectfully request that socon Cheryl Gallant, MP, have her staff put her speech Against the Christianophobes on her website, and any others that her discreditors have attempted to use as the basis for the various smears launched against her. These speeches should not be dropped from view, not edited out of the public record, and may prove down the road to have a prophetic value. I wish others online would join me in nominating Cheryl Gallant, MP, for a Christian Bloggers' Ariel Award 2005. - Owlb

URLbank for CHERYL GALLANT, MP

Cheryl Gallant, MP for Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke; Member of House of Commons committiees > a) Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs - Sept 30, 2002 to Nov 12, 2003; and b) Standing Committee on Industry, Science, and Technology - Sept 30, 2002 to Nov 12, 2003

•Gallants's website frontpage
•Gallant's speeches
• CBC, CBC Conservative MP calls for repeal of hate law (June 6, 2004 update)
• CTV.ca, MP Gallant compares abortion to Iraq beheading (June 7, 2004)
• LifeSite, Cheryl Gallant, the Most Bashed over Pro-Life Stand Re-elected by a Landslide (June 29, 2004)
• CTV.ca, Tory MP says Christians are persecuted in Canada (March 17, 2005)
• CTV.ca, Conservative convention off to rocky start (March 18, 2005)

RELATED CTV VIDEOCLIPS (unavailable to us)

CTV Newsnet Live: Conservative Convention starts 13:06
CTV News: David Akin on a ruckus convention start 1:31
CTV News: Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife with his view 1:20
CTV Newsnet Live: Peter MacKay speaks at the convention, part one 7:13
CTV Newsnet Live: Peter MacKay speaks at the convention, part two 8:20
CTV Newsnet Live: Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife, Mike Duffy and
.............Jane Taber from the convention 4:19
CTV Newsnet Live: Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife, Mike Duffy and
............Jane Taber from the convention, part two 4:05

My tentative conclusion from this list, unavailable due to refWrite's technical inability to access these online videos, is that the mystery reporter in Owlb's incomplete memory regarding of the name of the extremist bigotted reporter who breathlessly labelled Cheryl Gallant "extremist" is probably Jane Taber. I hope some student with the appropriate desktop technology could research the accuracy of the probablility, and if necessary correct it for us. - Owlie Scowlie

Politics: Canada: Political party rankings frozen in favour of Liberals, dang!

About 10 days ago, I recall seeing stats on the relative rankings of Canada's federal parliamentary poiitical parties - by now, even refWrite's American readers know the gang by name ... Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats, and Bloc Québecois. Maybe I ran across variations on the theme in the time since; so I went searching in my URL bank (what is called with considerable assininity "bookmarks") - and sho'nuff I came across the live link of my title in this blog entry.

The ranks for federal parties then was

Libs ......38%
Tories ...25%
NDP ..... 15%
Bloc Q .. no proportion given, another asininity ...

"The Liberal lead of 13 points was up from 7 points in a September poll by the same firm," Strategic Counsel - according to Randall Palmer's "Canadian opposition threat to government dwindles," Reuters (Octobr 19, 2005) picking up a Globe & Mail item of the same day.

Palmer goes into the details of how the Liberal Prime Minister, Paul Martin, and his party cohorts have consistently outmanoeuvered Tories, socialists, and Québec nationalists. Indeed, I would underscore that Martin has done so despite there being that Sword of Damocles hanging over his head - the forthcoming and forthcoming and forth-yawn-coming report on Liberal party chicanery that has been investigated by the Martin-appointed federal Commission of Judge Gomery (drawn for the task from the Québec Supreme Court).

The scandal involves millions of dollars absconded by phoney and slush payments from Federal coffers to advertizing firms in Québec. ostensibly to pay for pro-federal Canada's side in the referendum contrived by the Québec nationalist separatists of the provinical party, Parti Québecois - yes, with which the federal party, Bloc Québecois, has considerable ideological affinity. The Adscam debacle (in French, le scandale des commandites [scandal of the limited liablilty companies]) enraged Québec at the time, in part because it gives the impression that the Liberal Party in power in Ottawa had bawt the "Yes" win that kept la belle province in Canada. But, as I 've ;pointed out before, not all the Liberal largesse from the people's funds actually did pay for any advertizing of any sort - much of it was simply billed for no task completed nor even undertaken, no work or service or goods whatsoever, just slush money to the firms. Of course, there seems to have been a transmission of a considerable of such slush back into the coffers of - not the Federal Canadian government - but the coffers of the federal Liberal Party of Canada. These are the contours of the scandal that should have long ago brawt down the pitiful government of the crafty Martin and his minions.

However, the disgrace is not on Martin and his fed Libs for their survival instincts and skillful self-protection. It's the socialists and the Q nationalists in the Fed Parliament who disgraced the country by not joining with the Tories in casting out the scammatics. But: pause, if you will, because the errant parties looked at the public opinion polls and the decision they made seems to have been governed by the conviction that the public simply didn't want another election so soon, and could live with whatever skulduggery in which Martin and his fed Libs may have been involved. The press tends to play the angle that no matter how stinky Martin is, Stephen Harper's Conservatives are even less trusted to head a government. The socialists, meantime, are working to insinuate their influence into the Liberal program; but a recent round of negotiations toward that end left the NDP leader, Jack Layton, bruised by Martin's No! The issue was the NDP's attempt to extract a promise from the Martin Libs to deny Fed funding to any province that permitted a "two tier" health care system (where "two tier" stands for mixed delivery by government non-profit tax-financed and for-profit health facilities and doctors).

Whatever the stats for party ranking, refWrite supports a two-tier system where every doctor has to give at least one full day of medical work gratis to clinics for the poor. No doctor should be permitted to entirely opt out; at the same time, no doctor should be forced to serve only within government facilities. How waiting lists can be evened out and speeded up is a further matter, but should not obviate against the need for a two-tier system. - Owlb

For an early hi-intensity francophone view "Le Scandale des commandites, un crime d'État," by Jean-Marc Rioux, Québec-Politique, March 24, 2004.

Syria: Rogue regime: UN Security Council hears report on Syrian state crimes - US, UK, France vs Russia, China

Three weeks ago, The Associated Press rain a story "Syria growing more isolated" which I first encountered on Yahoo where it was dumped; but fortunately it's still online at AINA. The article mentions the coming US deadline of October 25 for the publication of a report on Syria's complicity or lack thereof, most immediately, the assassination of the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri. In response Lebanon experienced its Cedar Revolution, while Syrian troops and Intelligence officers were expelled (withdrawn, Syria would say) back over the border, where now they function to re-inforce the Syrian military's control of the Syrian population itself, doing so on behalf of President Bashir Assad's Baathist Party. Meantime, the UN probe has recently been completed.

Syrian officials have largely been silent on the probe. Beyond dull, vague and lengthy editorials about Syria paying for its staunchly anti-Israel stance, the media, all state-run, have largely ignored the developments.

For news about their country, Syrians have turned to the Internet, satellite television and Lebanese newspapers. And the news they get leaves them bewildered and worried. ¶ "People have no other source of information," said Abdul-Salam Haykal, head of the only public relations communications agency in Syria. "This is worrying." ¶ "We want the president to appear on local TV and tell us what's going on and reassure us," he said. ¶ On the surface, life in Syria appears normal. The streets are full of shoppers snapping up special sweets to eat at the end of daily fasts during the holy month of Ramadan. ...

But the capital Damascus is rife with an undercurrent of confusion and constant rumor -- of possible U.N. sanctions, U.S. action, or even a possible change in the government if Syria is blamed for Hariri's death. ¶ The U.N. investigation is not the only source of pressure on Syria. Washington considers the country a destabilizing element in the region and has been pushing the regime to change its behavior. ¶ It wants Damascus to crack down on Arab militants crossing into Iraq, expel radical Palestinians and disarm the Lebanese Hezbollah group, which spearheaded the guerrilla war against Israel's occupation of south Lebanon, which ended in 2000.

Until it complies, the Syrian regime is being shunned by the West. The U.S. ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobey, was recalled to Washington shortly after Hariri's assassination, and there are no signs she will be returning soon. ¶ Senior European and American visitors have stopped calling on Damascus. And the European Union keeps delaying the signing of a crucial Syrian-EU trade agreement that would help boost Syria's stagnant economy. Syria says U.S. pressure is behind the delay.

Then, suddenly, one the principals of Syria's misdeeds in Lebanon where he functioned for two decades, a "63-year-old Baathist major general," now Minister of the Interior in the Assad government, Gazi Kanaan, according the official news agency, suicided himself "in his office," Reuters' reporter Suleiman al-Khalidi told us on October 12. Al-Khalidi does not speculate on whether Kanaan was assassinated, or was given the option he is reported to have taken. Already 4 Lebanese generals had been arrested by the UN special invetigator; but, in Syria itself, the hi-level suspects (Kanaan and a few other ranking officials, at the behest of Assad), had only to open their bank accounts to UN inspection. For its part, the US had already taken to freezing the accounts of a certain list of suspect Syrians, as well.

A week after the suicide, it came to lite that Syria had indeed all along known that Hariri was to be assassinated, raising the question whether Kanaan or his Syrian superior in Lebanon or their superiors in Syria itself had given the order to take out Hariri - a Sunni Muslim who was not himself in office at the time, having resigned months earlier and publicly taken on
the task of campaigning nationally and internationally for the ouster of the Syrians and against the Christian-Muslim cabal running Lebanon for its neighbor. The info surfaced in a UN report by its its special investigator, a German criminalist Detlev Mehlis.

But the [56-page UN] report paints a detailed portrait of involvement by senior members of Syria's security and political apparatus and will give weight to efforts by Washington, Paris and London to sanction Syria in the U.N. Security Council. ¶ The U.N. investigation notes that shortly before the fatal blast, Islamic militant Ahmad Abdel-Al, who is described as having ties to the Syrian authorities, telephoned Mr. Lahoud, among others. The international investigation notes that the crime had been prepared for several months by a well-connected group and that Mr. Hariri's movements were carefully monitored. His telephones had been tapped and his schedule scrutinized. Indeed, it did not appear to be a simple matter to kill Mr. Hariri, the enormously wealthy and, in some quarters, still very popular politician.

Mr. Hariri traveled with private security, and on the morning of Feb. 14, the group was in a convoy of Mercedes sedans and a Chevrolet sport utility vehicle with communications-jamming devices and guns, followed by an ambulance with paramedics. Shortly after 2 p.m. on the day of the assassination, the report found, a white Mitsubishi van was videotaped by a bank's security camera to be traveling just ahead of the Hariri convoy, but moving at one-sixth the speed. A blast, presumably from the van, ripped an enormous hole in the street and injured scores of people nearby.

On the same day, October 21, further info emerged regarding Syria, but this time not from its neighbor to the West, Lebanon; rather, this time from its neighbor to the East, in the person of Yasser Sabawi al-Tikriti.

"Basically Sabawi[, as he's called, minus his clan designation, al-Tikriti] was found, and caught red-handed giving money to ... demonstrators [demanding the release of Saddam Hussein], who he was trying to incite to violence,'' says Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser. "We believe he was a major fundraiser and a major supporter of the terrorists."

But there are indications that help in Mr. Sabawi's arrest came from an unexpected corner: Syria.

[Syria is t]he country Iraqi officials and the Bush administration accuse of aiding Iraq's raging insurgency[; Syria] recently deported Sabawi to Iraq, according to an official at the Defense Ministry, who asked not to be named. This was first reported by the Associated Press, citing two anonymous sources.

However, Mr. Rubaie said "there was no Syrian help" in Sabawi's arrest, saying it was a lucky break brought about by the man's own carelessness. Asked if he knew whether Sabawi had been expelled from Syria, he replied: "I don't have any comment on that."

Sabawi's arrest came on a day when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice maintained US pressure on the Syrian regime, alleging that it and Iran are funding and supporting insurgents inside Iraq. "Syria and Iran must decide whether they wish to side with the cause of war or with the cause of peace," Rice said. She added that President Bush had not taken the possible use of force "off the table" with regard to Syria.

One should, at this point, note the geostrategic spread of this story: We started in Lebanon with the assassination of Hariri; the eastward next step takes us to Syria; Syria takes us to Iraq; and Lebanon, Syria, Iraq take us to the eastmost country of the quartet, Iran. Now, Iran has been the financier of the huge Hezbullah terrorist group in Lebanon and has added support to terrorists seeking to undermine the new government of Iraq, as well. Just yesterday, the new President of Iran fiercely promised to annihilate Israel. The Christian Science Monitor article (October 21) above, by Dan Murphy and Rhonda Roumani, speculates that Sabawi was squealed-out by backdoor manoeuvres of Syria to placate the West, especially the US.

President George Bush, however, was of another mind than the Assad regime, whether it squealed-out Sabawi or not.

President Bush called on the United Nations yesterday to convene a session on a report naming relatives of Syria President Bashar Assad as suspects in the assassination of former Lebanon Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
"The report strongly suggests that the politically motivated assassination could not have taken place without Syrian involvement," Mr. Bush said .... The investigation named President Assad's brother, Maher Assad, Syria's security chief, as well as his brother-in-law, Asef Shaukat, who runs military intelligence. Several other members of the Syrian and Lebanese security apparatus were also named as planning or approving the Hariri slaying.
Mr. Hariri, a wealthy real estate magnate with close ties to Washington and Saudi Arabia, resigned as prime minister in late 2003, protesting Syria's control of Lebanese politics, defense and other internal issues.
Although divisive in life, his death unified the Lebanese people against Syrian meddling, touching off months of popular protests and crippling Beirut's credibility.
The assassination also galvanized international opposition to the Syrian occupation, which began during Lebanon's bloody civil war, and ended only with a U.N. Security Council resolution this past spring.
There are a range of options, including political pressure on Damascus and narrowly drawn sanctions on government officials.

The above comes from a Christian Science Monitor editorial; the same day CSM published a meditative piece by Souheila Al-Jadda, starting from an experience at a hotel where her hajib traditional attire was not welcome, she gives a rapid summary of Syria today.

while the hotel's dress code reflects a growing willingness here to accept foreign cultures, values, and business practices, Syria must play catch-up with the rest of the world to achieve modernity. When first taking office, after the death of his father in 2000, President Bashar Al Assad promised reform at the political, social, and economic levels - yet signs of change have been slow and their extent limited. Internet service providers in Syria have popped up everywhere, although e-mails can be monitored by the government. The telecommunications industry has boomed, flooding the market with the latest cellphones. The government opened a stock exchange, partially privatized several banks, and allowed insurance companies to operate there. Import taxes have been significantly reduced, and foreign companies, like the American fast-food chain KFC, are beginning to open businesses in Syria.

But these reforms are mainly economic; little progress has been made on establishing civic institutions or protecting human, civil, and political rights - nor on freedom of speech and press. Debate and criticism of the government is only marginally tolerated. The secret police continues to carry out political arrests, such as the recent detention of leaders of an Arab nationalist group, the Jamal Al Atassi Forum, for reading a statement by the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization banned for violent opposition to the Syrian regime.

Nonetheless, the Syrian reign of fear which characterized the decades-long dictatorship of the elder Assad appears to have faded, and Mr. Assad retains popular support.

But Miss Al-Jabba is an Amrican professional hajibbing in her parents homeland at a hotel catering to GIs on R&R from the boiling toils of the Iraq battlefront. While CSM allows Al-Jabba insouciantley to mince down on the side of Assad, the same day (Octobber 24), The Washington Times carries a report "Damascus Spring," by London Telegraph reporter Harry de Quetteville with a very different take on the Assad regime.

A brutal beating delivered last week to Anwar al Bounni, one of the few lawyers who dares to represent political prisoners before Syria's security court, indicates that after a brief "Damascus Spring," the administration of President Bashar Assad is cracking down on dissent. Mr. al Bounni, a slight, quick-to-smile human rights lawyer from Damascus, was driving through the capital when his car was cut off by another vehicle. Several men jumped out, pulled Mr. al Bounni from his car and beat him around the head, leaving him dazed and badly bruised. His treatment was a sign that, for all the hopes of a more relaxed regime when President Hafez Assad died in 2000 and was succeeded by his second son, Bashar, Syria has returned to the bad old days.

On October 25, the axe more or less fell on Syria when Devlet Mehlis of the Independent Criminal Commission presented his report to the Security Council, as reported by AP via Fox News.

The United States has intensified pressure on Syria following the report's release late Thursday: President Bush said "serious pressure" needs to be applied against Damascus but diplomacy must be given a chance before the United States takes any military action.

The Bush administration is talking about next Monday as a target date for a resolution - and a ministerial meeting of the Security Council to give its adoption added prominence. But Russia and China - both veto-wielding members of the council - don't appear in any hurry, and Moscow, which has close ties to Syria, would likely oppose sanctions or any reference to them.

France indicated Monday it would not support sanctions against Syria before Mehlis finished his investigation. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also has indicated the United States might be willing to put off its push for sanctions.

The Mehlis report accused key Syrian and Lebanese security officials of orchestrating the bombing that killed Hariri and 20 others. Mehlis acknowledged that he deleted references implicating the brother and brother-in-law of Syrian President Bashar Assad because he didn't know the report would be made public and the allegations were not corroborated.

The report said Syria's cooperation in form - but not substance - "impeded the investigation and made it difficult to follow leads." To complete the probe, the Syrian government must fully cooperate with investigators, including by allowing Syrians to be interviewed alone outside Syria, it said.

Hours after the Mehlis report to the UN Security Council, and blustering responses from Syria: the US, UK, and France presented a draft resolution to the effect that "Syria Must Comply" - or else. Besides a number of measures and penalties, the ante rose:

If Syria does not fully cooperate with the investigation, the draft says the council intends to consider "further measures" to ensure compliance, including sanctions.

The draft resolution also calls for anyone designated by the commission as suspected of involvement in Hariri's assassination to be subject to a travel ban and to have their assets frozen.

The proposed resolution would be under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter which is militarily enforceable.

The United States and France circulated the resolution hours after the chief U.N. investigator, Detlev Mehlis, briefed the council on his report which implicated top Syrian and Lebanese security officials in the car bomb that killed Hariri and 20 other people.

Today, CSM published commentary by George A. Lopez, "Impose 'SMART' sanctions on Syria."

The startling revelations of last week's report by Detlev Mehlis on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has set the stage for a significant United Nations Security Council debate. In response to the report's naming of five top Syrian political elites, including the brother and brother-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad, and a number of Lebanese intelligence officials as likely culprits, the United States appears poised to ask the Council to impose harsh economic sanctions on Syria.

A number of factors strongly suggests that Council members want to hold the perpetrators accountable for this terrorist act. But a US call for comprehensive and highly punitive sanctions that not-so-subtly aim at regime change in Syria will be counterproductive. This has less to do with whether the US could forge a political consensus for such action, and more with which do not.

And further:

Smart sanctions work best when they are not aimed at punishment or isolation of a regime, but when they engage leaders constructively with the Council in remedying the conditions which give rise to the sanctions. In this case, targeted sanctions serve as the clear and credible stick, as well as a carrot (incentive), for those Syrian and Lebanese leaders not involved in the crime. These governmental elites need to be convinced that their compliance in bringing these murderers to justice will bring a lifting of the sanctions and the promised benefits of a return to normal economic life.

Since yesterday, both Russia and China have indicated they will not support economic sanctions, but then too they have not evinced any interest in making Syria guarantee its borders for the prevention of terrorists entering Iraq, for ending the terrorists use of Syria as safe haven, nor for ending Syria's repression of its own population. The crowds you saw on TV news supporting the Assad regime? Baathist party cadres and a totally state-controlled news media.

The other day I read somewhere that the "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon had more or less petered out. However, we must recall that even with Syria gone, Iran still finances an independent terrorist / military force there. Thus, we shouldn't be surprised that the UN responsibles are insisting that the whole process toward democratizatoin towad which they are working will be incomplete until "considerable progress had been made toward meeting other parts of Resolution 1559, which called for Syria to withdraw all military forces and intelligence operatives as well as the disarmament of all Lebanese militias." (For the full article, click-up this blog entry's live-link title.)

- Owlb

China: Labor: The need for an underground Christian labor movement in capitalist-Communist China

China e-Lobby instructs us on the implications of the end of textile exports / imports in worldwide trade where the role of the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC = Communist China) is paramount. The e-Lobby relates this development to the outrageously undervalued PRC currency, which profits on holding down the exchange rate artificially, instead of allowing it to float to its market-value. This means the PRC is subsidizing the bottom-basement cheap prices for textiles in American and Canadian department stores. There, due to underpricing the Chinese goods compete against the low-wage American and Canadian garment and textile workers, hitting certain ethinic groups (often immigrants) concentrated in this industry. Even worse, the Chinese product undercuts the very low prices of the very poorly-paid textile industires of other Asian nations.

But more than that, China does not permit a free labour movement. The puppet labour organization is an anti-worker instrument of the state. At the same time, China represses several religions, permitting only state-directed denominations of Christians, Buddhists, and others to function - they having "registered" with the state. Unregistered groups, on the other hand, are growing massively underground, in conventicles, as church history used to call underground Christian groups meeting in secret. In China, in the case of illegal Christian assemblies and evangelization, often the groups meet in houses, called appropriately "House Churches." There are multiplied millions of Christian believers in China, unregistered and meeting in House Churches. Undoubtedly, there must be at least a few of them are already active in the underground free labor movement. May God grant them strength and increase their number, and work thru them and others for a democratic labor movement in what's now Communist China. And may the vision of a distinctly Christian union take root and prosper there.

Now, in my version of Christianity, informed by the European experience, Christian churches should encourage Christians who want to follow Christ in all of life, to develop Christian labour unions to enter a new tone into labour relations, a tone based on Gospel social principles. Such a movement exists in Europe, Latin America, and other continents, including a sturdy minority union so founded in Canada, the Christian Labour Association of Canada. A very small companion union is struggling to develop itself in the USA.

Since in Communist China, free labour organization is a vocation that involves tremendous sacrifice, no one can enter into it without counting the cost. Still, the Gospel, when it faces the conditions of labouring people under the capitalist-Communist yoke in the PRC, calls for the generation of an All-China Christian Labour Association. One of its chief tasks is to work co-belligerently with other groupings in struggle for better working conditions, more equitable pay, days off, and all the things that add up to a loyal and healthy body of employees for any company. But, also, in doing so a Christian labour union in Communist China will immediately come up against the state, and would not be able to avoid the vast dimensions of such a task - not only in regard to organziation and negotiation with employers, but also in calling publicly for the end of slave labor that is integral to the new capitalist-Communist economic system. - Owlb


Check out these revealing sources compiled and commented on by China e-Lobby. I've tried to live-link all the external sources of the set of items selected below; if you click-up an item online, you can navigate to other sources referenced on earlier e-Lobby editions and marked in each case by "fifth," "third," etc, so you can find the particular labour-related item in the sometimes long list of items for each day's edition. Some of these live links are sheer dynamite to anyone who hasn't really been following what's behind China's economic explosion. - Politicarp

October 25, 2005 12:13:13 PM EDT

International Labor Organization notes, but discounts, Communist textile surge: The report published by the group found that “China's share of the global (textile) market has grown by 3% to 16% since January when global limits came to an end” (BBC). Despite the cheery comments, the ILO “was unable to give an exact figure on the number of jobs that had been lost.” What nations were part of the lost 13% of market share was not discussed (see also fifth, fourth, second, fifth, and third items).
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January 5, 2005

Quotas on imported textiles end, PRC likely big winner: A worldwide set of trade restrictions on textiles came to an end Saturday, causing tremendous worry among both American textile producers and foreign producers not named Communist China.  There is one rather slim silver lining – longtime PRC rival India is also expected to do well in the post-restriction environment.  Reports: BBC, Washington Post
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May 12, 2005

Communist China won’t revalue its currency: The Communist mouthpiece People's Daily announced that the regime would “revalue the yuan next week” (BBC), but the Communist central bank denied it, and the paper later issued a correction. The deliberately devalued currency – called the yuan or renminbi – has greatly damaged both U.S. manufacturing and the export sectors of America’s allies in Asia.

On Communist prison labor camps: Tim Luard, BBC, examines the state of Communist China’s labor camps, and the plight of those sent inside them.
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May 14, 2005

U.S. imposes restrictions against Communist textiles: A surge in textile exports from Communist China that followed the end of worldwide textile trade restrictions (fifth item) could be stemmed by new restrictions by the Bush Administration to “limit annual growth in Chinese imports to as little as 7.5 percent a year” ( Washington Post. U.S. textile firms were not alone in struggling against the Communists’ combination of union-less wages, prison workers, and the artificially cheap currency (fourth item); “Central America and Bangladesh were preparing for devastating competition from China.”
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August 18, 2005

No textile deal: Talks between Communist China and the U.S. on the former’s surge in textile exports to the latter “ended Wednesday night without a deal” (United Press Int’l via Washington Times) on stemming the tide [seems to have been updated September 29, 2005 - Owlb]. The Communist China’s textile exports surge comes after worldwide textile trade curbs ended on January 1, and is crowding out several developing nations in the process (fifth, fourth, second, and fifth items).
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Many thanks to J D Maguire who keeps China e-Lobby going and up-to-date! - Owlb, Politicarp, Anaximaximum, and Owlie Scowlie, the gang writing and researching for refWrite,

Politics: Israel/Palestine: Israel decides not to demand Palestine's Abbas move to knock Hamas from the January ballot

Sharon has showed his uncanny sense of stopping short of too much, and did so again this week (after Palestine Authority Pres Mahmound Abbas visited Bush in Washington, one must note). Sharon decided not to demand that the Abbas government deny the terrorist organization Hamas (which has conducted many lethal assaults on Israeli innocents) a place on the ballots when voters go to the polls in January. This event will be Palestine's first election of a Parliament. And previously the overall Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization served as an umbrella agency for all the distinct organizations of the armed movement, but was never popularly elected by a citizenry.

The upcoming elections will be the first step toward a representative body of any kind for the whole country, at least since the death of Yasser Arafat and the election to the PA Presidency of Abbas. If memory serves, Abbas had already insisted on postponing these projected parliamentary elections, saying the country wasn't yet ready for them according to the earlier schedule. In the meantime he has tried to bring not only Hamas to heel, as it had elected a significant minority of reprsentatives to town councils months back, but also the Al Aqsa Brigade's militia, which actually is a wing of Al Fatah, Abbas' own party (with many organized internal factions), formerly itself the key element in the PLO and Arafat's base of power. The renegade conduct of the Al Aqsa terrorists has been a seething sore in the side of the President. If he can't control his own affiliates, how can he tame Hamas (which publicly opposes him), so as thereby to satisfy Israel that the peace process is really on the road?

At the same time that Israel will not break off contacts with the Abbas-led Palestine Authority over the presence of a terrorist organization on the January ballot; yet neither is Israel approving that presence. Israel does not like the fact that confronts it, at all. But when Bush failed to rail against Hamas during the press conference during the Abbas visit to the White House, it would seem Sharon decided to zip his lips on the matter too. For now. In the meantime, however, Sharon is taking action against the continuing Hamas attacks by closing Gaza's borders, to end Palestinian free entry into both Israel itself and into Egypt.

The Associated Press' Josef Federman reported today the other side of Israel's present posture, the pro-active side. Israel has not gone limp:

A top Mideast envoy criticized Israel in especially tough language for moving too slowly on negotiations to open Gaza's borders, saying the country is behaving almost as if the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip never happened.

Without dramatic progress soon, a rare chance to revive Gaza's shattered economy - and the peace process - will be lost, James Wolfensohn said in a letter to the UN secretary general and other international mediators obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

Violence, meanwhile, quickly escalated between Israel and the Palestinians after Israeli troops killed Luay Saadi, a top Palestinian fugitive, and a close accomplice in a pre-dawn shootout in the Tulkarem refugee camp in the West Bank. Saadi, the leader of Islamic Jihad's military wing in the West Bank, was blamed for the deaths of 12 Israelis in attacks in recent months.

Islamic Jihad threatened revenge and launched at least two homemade rockets from Gaza into Israel, causing no injuries. Israel, which said it would not tolerate any attacks from Gaza since it pulled out of the territory last month, responded with an artillery assault on open fields in northern Gaza, the army said. There were no reports of injuries from the artillery.

We should note here the ritual nature of this last exchange; the terrorist org takes its revenge by shooting off two ineffective rockets, while Israel responds with an artillery ammo "assault on open fields." So, Palestinians cannot enter Israel for work, nor can goods enter Palestine for trade in merchandise to be sold in the marketplaces of Gaza, nor vice versa. At the other end of the Gazan territory, now emptied of Israeli settlers, the border is also closed and has been since the removal of the settlers.

Israel closed the Rafah crossing into Egypt, Gaza's main link to the outside world, shortly before it withdrew from Gaza. It also has severely restricted the passage of Palestinian laborers and goods in and out of Israel, the main Palestinian export market, since an earlier wave of rocket attacks right after the pullout.

Israeli officials say the measures are solely because of security considerations.

Meanwhile, Abbas has made public its desire to bring the Al Aqsa militants out of their idleness (which fosters their attacks on Israel) by recruiting them into the Palestinian Authority's security forces. It's true that more hardered veterans are needed by PA security if it is going to have an effect in stopping Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The latter two groups have taken too intansigent an opposition to Al Fatah, the PA, and Mahmoud Abbas to offer them a similar deal. If Abbas can pull off this deal with his own renegades, then perhaps Palestine can be pacified by at least stopping the terror activities of Hamas, in which case perhaps this organizatipn at least will continue its life by transforming into a political force seeking power thru elections. There is some talk that it may even drop the provision in its own constitution committing it to the destruction of the State of Israel entirely. - Politicarp

Politics: Quebec: Political manifesto gives pause, translation of critique of Pour un Quebec lucide

refWrite's translation of a blog entry in the excellent francophone blog La sphère des idées J. H. (Jacques Hamel), posted there by jmike on Friday, Oct21,2k5. - Owlb

For Québec's clarity

Since all the media are talking about it, I'm taking a few moments between two exams [at the university], to direct your attention to a [recent political] Manifesto: Pour un Québec lucide, an easy-to-read document of ten pages. Endorsed by several personalities, this proclamation draws a critical portrait regarding Quebec and its future. Described as alarmist by some, as realistic by others, the Manifesto clarifies four key arguments:

1.) the economic weakness of Québec
2.) the public debt
3.) significant demographic decline on its way
4.) international competition

And overall, Québec society's refusal to change.

I will not elaborate immediately each of the Manifesto's arguments, but we must nevertheless recognize it's necessary to be somewhat worried [by it all]. The way in which Québéc society will tackle each subject will in part determine the
future of Quebec. We have two options: to anticipate the challenges to come to reduce their impacts, or to let [the foreseeable problems and their repercussions] come at us [as they will].

To inform us on the position to be adopted, the Manifesto's authors supported three attitudes:

1.) clearness
2.) responsibility
3.) freedom

On the one hand, it will be necessary to recognize the problems which will undermine Quebec as the future approaches. Then, it will be necessary to discuss the actions necessary to avoid those [presently-foreseeable problems], and we will have to respect the freedom of those whose solutions [would have us depart from] the dogma of the [existing] Québéc model.

In short, the authors express to us the need for reforming our institutions and for adapting them to the 21st Century. But is this [agenda] politically realizable? I doubt the will of politicians to make reforms, especially if the proposals are not popular. Let us not forget that the [self-]interest of a politician is to be re-elected in four-years time. What good is it to revise the Québéc model, if to do so is to lose the election?

The best example of such a case would be [former Québec premier] Lucien Bourchard['s attempt]. In his Manifesto, he tried to propose to us solutions intended to bring Québec into the 21st Century, he having had all the leisure to do so as a Prime Minister. Would the case show us all the [general] hypocrisy of politicians? It seems that it is necessary to deviate from normal politics to really express one's opinion.

It is a pity, because the gasoline of Manifesto-proclamation is legitimate.

posted by jmike in French on La sphère des idées de J. H. (Jacques Hamel)

Juridics: Business: US Supreme Court's role in adjudicating major cases involving business

A big hole exists in the expertise of the US Supreme Court Justices in regard to business law. Recently, the Court (often acronymed as SCOTUS = Supreme Court of the Unted States) has demonstarated its shallow understanding of business, not in regard to big business or small, but in regard to the business side of a vital and many-sided relationship of individual and familiy daily life. Indeed, the Court opened the floodgates for two kinds of corporate entities (those of local municipalities in cahoots with a Big Box national retail chain, for instance) to enter into collusion for the purpose of overwhelming and nullifying the domicile-property rights of homeowners. This was the notorious decision of the present demented set of Justices in regard to so-called "Eminent Domain." (Here I must register my dissent from the absolutized principle of "individual right" referenced at the end of the article just linked as it violates the principles of societal sphere-specificity, -sovereignty, and -universality; for the text of the US Supreme Court opinion, concurrence, and dissents see FindLaw.)

According to the provisions of the new business-idiotic law made by the present set of Justices (before the arrival of the the new Chief Justice John Roberts), two varieties of corporate entities could conspire against homeowners (all or any of them - rich and poor and in the middle) to take the homes of the owners (at a mere pittance of their market worth, we may assume, but that isn't my main point point here), so as to maximize the profits of the parachuted-into-town Big Box chain involved - in exchange for whatever tax revenues the chain could pay-out to the town government - which could in turn reduce property taxes for those remaining homeowners who were not dumped-out of their homes like those who had the misfortune to dwell "in the zone" of the Eminent Domain transgression.

Whatever reduction in town property taxes mite result from the displacement of those who had their homes seized for, destroyed by, and property relegated to the new Big Box developer, the benefits would accrue to the other class (again rich and poor alike) of homeowners, citizens, and tax-payers who did not happen to live in the tragically-affected zone and some of whom had had the foresight to run for town office for these most venal purposes in the first place (nb: "venial" means something else).

This is but one sort of tragedy that the business-stupid Supreme Court has already foisted on American private and publice life. With Sandra Day O'Conner on her way out of Supreme Court service, a different kind of Justice is needed to join John Roberts, who has some experience with busienss law, on the SCOTUS bench.

There are other sorts of business issues needing attention as well, business issues other than the example I cited for the wideness of its coverage, other business issues long neglected that have generated in the American business community/ies a hunger for really wise and informed and business-law-experienced Justices.

Not since Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. retired from the bench in 1987 have executives had even one high court justice with deep experience in the issues that govern American commerce. Antonin Scalia and Stephen G. Breyer built their reputations as law school professors. Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas spent much of their careers in government. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. William H. Rehnquist, Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter worked for mid-size firms that weren't big players in corporate litigation. John Paul Stevens worked briefly as a corporate antitrust expert, but stopped practicing long before joining the high court.

If Miers is confirmed, she and Roberts could herald a sea change for corporate America. It's not that they'll necessarily be reliable pro-business votes. Their more immediate value to business would be their ability to recognize the significance of commercial questions that come to the court, and the ability to impress upon their fellow justices the need to hear cases critical to corporate America. They could provide two of the four votes needed for the Supremes to hear a case.

The late Chief Justice Rehnquist was happiest immersing himself in cosmic constitutional issues such as free speech and separation of church and state, touchstones for both the far right and far left. Few business conflicts are so high-minded. Most corporate questions that reach the Supreme Court are, to scholars and the public anyway, mundane and byzantine, often delving into mind-numbing federal statutes such as the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act or the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Unable to come to a stable definition of such important questions as "What is 'restraint of trade'"?, the confusing legacy of the present court is simply dumbfounding.

Business finds itself grappling with lingering circuit court splits on issues such as antitrust and pension regulation, a legal patchwork that has executives reaching for the Excedrin. And they continue to be frustrated with the court's chronic reluctance to interpret, once and for all, critical regulations such as the Americans With Disabilities Act.

So we are told by Lorraine Woellert, who gives us the valuable report quoted above (Delaware Online, Oct23,2k5). However, she succumbs to her own brand of idiocy in the final paragraphs of the report (Woellert writes for Business Week too), where she sets offf the Religious Right against the Free-Market Right, as she binomializes her categories. She doesn't recognize that these cats are often enuff identical (all too often I would say, if you take the Libertarian definition of a free-market which is often inflated into an absolute in a most anti-pragmatic fashion).

At the same time, there are Pro-Lifers who are anti-Free-Market all the way to the opposite extreme of bona fide Socialism. In my view neither of these "purist" views is correct, nor politically normative. Likewise, there are Free-Marketeers running businesses that generate the demand for abortions, but who do not support unrestricted abortion, rather wanting it restricted markedly. Instead of relying on a narrowly binomialist logic, Woellert may find that there are many interesting stories to be found in the varieities of mix-and-match on the two issues she reduces to clichés, and then sets in unmitigated opposition to one another. She mite help herself by exploring a matrix logic instead, one that prefers possiblities of contrariety (as against contradictories only), or the even more complex and mentally-rich spectra- or gradient-logics. In most cases, narrow binomialisism is a curse when facing real-life problems.

In the case where non-absolutized support for restrained laws on abortion and where non-absolutized support for free markets are not rigged into polar opposites, we can see more clearly on one side the absolutism of the "Consistent Ethic of Life" (for instance) which would so prioritize its own absolutized issue - that Antitrust Law would pale into juridical insignificance; on the other hand, a Libertarian absolutization of Free Market ideology would have to categorize Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry as a growth industry - the trade of which should not be restrained. Woellert is a victim of her own conflation of categories; thus, her logic suffers from her attempt to solve too many problems of conceptualization and demographic/issue analysis at once, with too few categories and too little heuristic, pragmatic practicality to deal with the real world.

I think Stephen Bainbridge makes a similar mistake in the opposite direction, albeit arguably only a rhetorical one, when he says

The business community clearly believes Miers will be strongly pro-business, which seems highly plausible given her business law background.

I can see Socialists and their kin trying to build an indictment from the one word "pro-business" that Bainbridge uses too glibly given that expertise in cases where the basic issues are between businesses do not tell us what "pro-business" can possibly mean.

Reprising Woellert's most salient paragraph, contra Bainbridge's word, I repeat: "It's not that they'll necessarily be reliable pro-business votes. Their more immediate value to business would be their ability to recognize the significance of commercial questions that come to the court, and the ability to impress upon their fellow justices the need to hear cases critical to corporate America." A strict constructionist of the Miers kind (Hat Tip to Burkean Canuck) must try to give teeth to the AntiTrust Law, without reaching decisions that are themselves in "restraint of trade," interpreted fairly. Otherwise, the Bainbridge article online at TechCentral Station offers much grist for thawtful mulling.

Yet, I would like to mention an even larger point: The value of the two Bush nominees on the Supreme Court is not "Their more immediate value to business," but their longterm value to the entire nation and to all members of society who are served by an economic system of good businesses and good business-law adjudication, whether it reaches all the way to some hi-est level constitutional issues as such, or not. The Supreme Court has several other responsibilities besides those of adjudicating Constitutional issues as such, and it needs other kinds of expertise besides that of Constitutional scholarship. - Owlb

Don't miss Harriet Miers an expert in business law. See also: Marvin Olasky on Theory vs Practical Experience

UPDATES: Hugh Hewitt skewers Anti-Miersian conservative pundit and baseball writer George Will, as does President Aristotle.

Intelligent Design: Science: The Wrath of NoGod (naturalistic religion + money + technique) = bigotry of scientific guilds

"The annual meeting of the Geological Society of America saw its members joining their biologist brethren in attacking the creationist challenge to evolution," says the subtext (semiotics: notice the word "brethren" in this context) to the headline in
New Scientist, in an article preview for "US geologists rally against intelligent design" (semiotics: notice the word "rally" in this context). The article preview is the greater part of an incomplete article of 331 words which is pay-for only (I shall not digress upon the way pay-for news - particularly of developments in science, religion, and health - is in spirit violative of freedom of speech, and of a class nature, and detrimental to the participation of poorer people in the public square and thus a reinforcement of news professions to guilds; but with crumbs, still some of us make do).



Meeting in Salt Lake City, Donald Wise attempted to rally the brethren to his call for "hardball" assault in "attacking the creationist challenge to Darwinian evolution." He called for solidifying the geological layers of his guilds dominated by the religions of naturalism + technicism, with those of "brethren" biologists ranked in their guilds dominated by the same religions of naturalism as an ultimate value and technicism as the working penultimate value which requires all the equipment that costs so much money in hi schools, colleges, and grad programs at universities - to say nothing of individual research programs for which taxpayers are the ultimate providers at universities, affiliated labs, and often rigged in joint ventures with corporate for-profit entities. The "hardball" is about both the secularist religion of St Darwin-according-to-his-latterday-disciples where the naturalism is no longer agnostic or passive, but aggressively jihadist as we are beginning to see. But more than that, the "hardball" is about money; the guilds of geology and biology are afraid that some others who espouse non-naturalsim as a better foundation for the sciences, because it is truly atheist in regard to the claims of sciences conceived without limits in determining the minds of society's youth and the vocations to which some of them are called thru further education. The enemy to the rigidified smug scientific guilds is a scientific revolution (Polanyi, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos). The classic work that precourses these seminal thinkers (Christian, humanist, anarchist, atheist) is that of I W N Sullivan, The Limitations of Science (NY: Viking, 1933; NY: New American Library, 1956 pbk ).

A most remarkable admission of unscientific bias, which precludes an admission that God is the only plausible explanation of the origin of the universe, is made by J. W. N. Sullivan. At his death, Time called him "one of the world's four or five most brilliant interpreters of physics to the world of common man." He said: "The beginning of the evolutionary process raises a question which is as yet unanswerable. What was the origin of life on this planet? Until fairly recent times there was a pretty general belief in the occurrence of 'spontaneous generation.' It was supposed that lowly forms of life developed spontaneously from, for example, putrefying meat. But careful experiments, notably those of Pasteur, showed that this conclusion was due to improper observation, and it became an accepted doctrine that life never arises except from life. So far as actual evidence goes, this is still the only possible conclusion. But since it is a conclusion that seems to lead back to some supernatural creative act, it is a conclusion that scientific men find very difficult to accept. It carries with it what are felt to be, in the present mental climate, undesirable philosophic implications, and it is opposed to the scientific desire for continuity. It introduces an unaccountable break in the chain of causation, and therefore cannot be admitted as part of science unless it is quite impossible to reject it. For that reason most scientific men prefer to believe that life arose, in some way not yet understood, from inorganic matter in accordance with the laws of physics and chemistry."

Please note: This text is derived from an explicitly evangelical Christian book online, a book in its Chapter 2 which has a specific purpose of apologetics, a variet of apologetics that's called "evidentialist" (in contrast to "presuppositionalist" or "experientialist," atlho the book as a whole is more multi-genred in the deployment of arguments in its discussion; the over-all purpose of the book is confirmation in the Christian faith of college students of Christian background. I like the book's succinct summary of Sullivan's argument and tenor. Further, the Google alogrithm for Advanced Search on "J+ W+ N+ Sullivan+ Limitations+ Science" yielded only this one reference cited above, for a search limited to just the terms specified. One reference! The amount of garbage I would have to wade thru for a perhaps gem 20 pages away set a limitation to my research of this author and title. More largely, I notice that Google does not yield as good results for non-Darwinism, non-evolutionism as it does for more neutral approaches or approaches of strictly neo-Darwinist kind like that of the dogmatician Dawkins. So, a thiestic evolutionary kind of approach today, such as that championed initially by Prof James McCosh, a major thinker in the history of American philosophy with a Common-Sense (Thomas Reid) and Evidentialist orientation that is pro-empirical, pro-scientific, and oriented to Intelligent Design just does not get the referencing it deserves (I'm thinking of the results of googling for Sullivan as above and Uko Zylstra as below). - Owlb

It would seem that the only limit the presentday guilds acknowledge is money for their establishment research programs. Any other claimaint for a place in scientific discussion has to be fawt off, they seem to think. The present Hardball Jihad of the Geology Guild is apparently motivated as much by ideology all the more fixational because it advances the business-as-usual approach to the divving up of all funds available to the discipline.

The actual principle that unites this priestly caste is that of uniformitarianism. It posits the uniformity of each of all the natural forces (each of which must be precisioned and formulated on the basis of conclusive empirical evidence), the uniformity of the natural forces that could possibly have influenced the formation of geological structures, and similarly of hydrological structures in the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, rain systems, and weather generally. Thus, the hypotheses of mavericks like the author of the theory of Worlds in Collision(1950) which relied on philological sources of ancient myths and legends was witlessly mocked by the combined biological and geological guilds.

Minus the mockery, the uniformitarian position was also held by some Reformational Christian biologists, led by Jan Lever (see his Creation and Evolution(1950) and his more popular Where Are We Headed? A Biologist Talks about Origins, Evolution, and the Future (1956). Lever, professor at the Free University in Amsterdam, continued in the line of James McCosh. Lever was also a follower of Herman Dooyeweerd's and D H Th Vollenhoven's Reformational philosophy, which became a location for a debate between Lever with Dooyeweerd who deepened neo-Augustinianism for biological thawt further by reviving a distinction between creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) in contrast to the gradual positivization and realization over a long time of the varieties of creation, a position cited by McCosh and leveraged by Dooyeweerd to dissent from the uniformitarian presupposition of his biologist follower, Lever. A similar view, with no necessary alignment to either side of this uniformitarianist vs non-uniformitarian issue - but like both sides commited to the view of long periods of time being empirically conclusive for geology as well as biology - was advanced by the Christian geological theorist J. R. van der Fliert also of the Free University [ "Fundamentalism and the Fundamentals of Geology," International Reformed Bulletin, Spring 1968.] Among American Evangelicals early appreciators of Van der Fliert's stance include Dr. Donald C. Boardman (Wheaton College), Dr. Richard Bube (American Scientific Affiliation), Dr. Roger J. Cuffey (Pennsylvania State University), Dr. Clarence Menninga (Calvin College).

At the same time, the maverick position opposing uniformitarianism with catastrophism also developed significantly. Immanuel Velikovsky's later Earth in Upheaval (1956) was purposely based, as he said , only on "stones and bones," but his burgeoning theory simply could not be entertained and modified within the guild to widen the range of optional explanations for the formation of the present structure of the Planet Earth.

Nowadays however, others are suggesting that the mentioned theory of the unity of life, held by neo-Darwinism and some reformational Christians in biology and zoology, accompanied by its corollary theory that the emergence of all life-forms from one single source on Earth, has been challenged more recently by such physicists as Paul Davies, in his book The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life who displaces the single-source view from an origin strictly on Earth to one on Mars.

The Fifth Miracle provides convincing arguments that life flourishes, and may indeed have begun, deep within the earth's crust, and not in Darwin's "warm little pond." And if in our planet's crust, why not in others'? Indeed, he shows that it is not just possible but likely that living organisms have passed between Earth and Mars embedded within meteorites [a catastrophist neo-Velikovsian nuance - Owlb]. Davies' command of the data and his facility with explaining it to nonprofessionals give the lie to his self-description as "a simple-minded physicist" intruding in another's domain. The best scientists hate to see questions finally answered and love to see new ones raised; by that standard (and by any other) The Fifth Miracle is a first-rate book of scientific speculation. --Rob Lightner

Paul Davies has also written well and interestingly on the spirituality of science, a task for which he is qualified by his doctorate in physics and his religious quest. Among his most engaging books are God and the New Physics and Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World

Are we but ideas in the mind of God? [Shades of Jonathan Edwards' Lockean platonizing! - Owlb] Platonic forms in one of many infinite universes? Davies (Theoretical Physics/Univ. of Adelaide, Australia; co-author, The Matter Myth, p. 1510, etc.) increasingly assumes the mantle of metaphysician as he probes once again theories of origin and destiny, space and time, and creation by design or chance. Some of this tracks familiar Davies ground: a reprise of Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Newton, Hoyle and Hawking. Quarks and GUT theories are revisited, as are chaos theory and quantum cosmology. But what makes this exercise different is the extent to which Davies probes computer science and mathematics to develop extraordinarily rich concepts of the nature of complexity. These chapters deal not only with the paradoxes inherent in self-reflecting systems and Gödel's proofs of undecidability in mathematics but relate these famous theorems to Turing's universal machines and the nature of ``computable'' vs. ``noncomputable'' numbers. The upshot of all this lofty discourse is the idea that the laws of physics (or nature) are ``computable'' and that the universe lends itself to simulation, given a universal computer. The more enthusiastic mathematicians exploring these ideas are prepared to say that such computers reveal the organized complexity of the universe, are capable of self-replication, and are therefore alive. Davies concludes that maybe the ultimate answer cannot be obtained through reason but only through mysticism, and he again states his conviction that we are truly meant to be here.... That's not necessarily the conclusion all readers will reach, but the mathematical excursions make this latest Davies volume of more than passing interest. -- From Kirkus Reviews via Amazon. Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. [end] I am using this text without permission on the basis of the Fair Use provisions of American copyright laws, and similiar provisions in Canadian law - Owlb

Now, we come back to the religious bigotry of a scientific ideology firmed up for its cadres because of the nearly-unmentioned fear that available funds the guild establishments and elites presently control will have to be shared with approaches to sciences which may want to re-direct goals of research programs (Lakatos) and uses of available technologies and yet-to-developed-techniques, on the basis of non-naturalistic religious presuppostions, rathan than the established naturlistic ones ("philosophical materialism") currently in vogue. Thus, in both biology and geology today, there are what Abraham Kuyper once characterized as two diametrically opposed sciences, because (all) science is divided by a plurality of ultimate starting points held in one or another presupposing faith as to what ultimate value should be the ground and origin of any particular science's self-elaboration out of a starting point (its axiomata) which becomes effective for the development of its questions, its problem-setting, its techniques (and hence technologies), and research programs.

The issue is not creationism.
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For an update, and a correction of the following clause, plus a reference to Roman Catholic teaching in regard to evolutionism, see refWrite's October 30 blog entry on ID.
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Creationism is a small and marginal approach to which most Christians do not subscribe, because it is founded on a shaky hermeneutics. If hi schools introduced senior-level courses in Biblical hermeneutics, creationism should be among the options studied there; but short of that it truly doesn't belong in any science curriculum. So-called "creation science" is merely a search of empirical confirmations of a limited hermeneutics approach to the Bible, and is thereby utterly tendentious; it should be understood as such but it should not be banned or held up to insulting mockery since it is just too religiously closely-held by too many who support financially thru their taxes paid for government schools and universities where the cadres of the scientific establishment function as professional agents of mockery and bigotry. And, besides, those raised on this particular hermeneutics may just produce something or other of value to everyone, as Feyerabend has demonstrated from well-known cases of the impact of narrow religious beliefs on creative discoveries in the history of science.

Intelligent Design (ID) is not creationism. It grew out of the guided-evolution standpoint ("theistic evolutionism" as launched by James McCosh's The Method of Divine Government before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species). Indeed, ID has always been a distinct discipline not dependent on either creationism or the guided-evolution viewpoint that persists (however represssed) within biology and geology. ID is held by antiChristians as well as Christians - and Jews, and Muslims. ID is held by antitheists as well as theists - most outspokenly by atheist philosopher Anthony Flew who startled the "brethren" by judging neo-Darwinism as empirically-false.

I conclude that the teaching of ID in state-schools - where the taxpayers' funds are used presently for an antipluralist bigoted approach to science, an approach unwilling to function alongside other views, with whom it may share techniques to a very large extent, while framed by a contrary discourse of valuation than that of a huge portion of the taxpaying public - is worth pursuing. Contrary to the anarchist philosopher of science and its history, Paul Feyerabend, the pluralist awareness of what science is and how it actually functions, when healthy in any society, is not to be utterly denied to the young in the schools. Feyerabend acknowledges the validity of adult mature plurality of fundamental views in the sciences, but he contradicts himself to insist that students be tawt only the textbook orthodoxies of mainstream humanist secularist self-enclosed nature-the-only-ultimate-and-determining-value. Feyerabend's Fallacy: Let the school students go thru the crisis of discarding the orthodoxy tawt them in school to the repression of knowledge of all other views, and then let some of them undergo religious conversion at some other time in life perhaps; and then, if they survive all this turmoil and manipulation, maybe some of them will re-enter the cadres of science with their now subversive values and the hard-gained insite that science can't be other than pluralist, not just as to its many disciplines, but as to the fundamental starting point in each science that stands behind a given science's own positive axiomata.

President Bush is more correct than Prof Feyerabend and more drastically correct than the bigotry-bound Geological Society of America, on allowing even students in the developmental stages of their scientific development confront and even debate among themselves the plurality of views and the variety of disciplines among which both biology and geology confront the implications of Intelligent Design, in a polite and considerate way appropriate to any scientific discourse.

In conclusion, I want to remark on why I mentioned Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven, Lever and Van der Fliert, along with St Ausgustine and the neo-Augustinian McCosh who advocated both guided evolution and Intelligent Design at Princeton University in the Nineteenth Century. Problem-historically speaking from the standpoint of the history of Western philosophy in its relation to biology, the heritage of their work has been passed on to Dr Uko Zylstra who currently is in actuality the main challenger to the present shape of ID theory and research; it is Zylstra who has raised the issue of the neglect of the foundational theme of the biotic basic-laws in ID theory so far, and has done so by expanding the framework of the philosophy of Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd. The publisher of his major essay on this matter is Zygon, a journal for biological theory. But the blurb presented editorially on the pay-for page to get into this essay, gets Zylstra's position wrong, insofar as his argument does not establish an absolute negation of ID while it does lead toward refutation of philosophical materialism, naturalism, and neo-Darwinian evolutionism as in Dawkins, thru Zylstra's sharing with Vollehnoven and Dooyeweerd their idea of an integrated array of creation law's . So, while something of a misleading Third Way construction is imposed on Zylstra, the editorial summation gives a good orientation to the pay-for article:

A central thesis of intelligent-design theorists is that physical and chemical laws and chance are insufficient to account for irreducibly complex biological structures and that intelligent design is necessary to account for such phenomena. This assertion, however, still implies a reductionist ontology. We need to recognize that reality displays multiple modes of being beyond simply chemical and physical modes of being, each of which is governed by laws for that mode of being. This essay argues for an alternate framework for understanding life phenomena that is neither philosophical materialism nor intelligent-design theory.

. A bit discontent, for a further snippet of orientation, I traced down the following technical reference online by Zylstra in The Dooyeweerd Pages:

Arthur Jones comments about differentiation (as linked to the biotic sphere's kernel of "generation") does get at an important element of the biotic modality. The recognition of differentiation / generation / morphogenesis as a "kernel" of the biotic sphere led me to argue for it as a distinct modality from the biotic modality. I made that argument in my paper entitled: "Dooyeweerd's concept of classification in Biology" as one of the essays in the Festschrift for Evan Runner, Life is Religion. In that essay I argue for a three kingdom classification of living things with the biotic, morphegenesis/differentiative, and sensory as the kernel modalites for the three kingdoms respectively. Although present classification theories in biology are usually based on a five kingdom classification model, I think the criteria for such a classification is less foundational than the one based on a modal analysis.

This development and challenge, which I call the Zylstra Hypothesis is relevant to the entire howling and gnashing of the establishment elites in biology and geology and to their parrots in the the teachers unions of the biological sciences (derivatively relevant also to geological scholarship), relevant whether or not there is or ever were an ID movement. - Owlb